Patsy Cline is amazing.
She also helped me to decide I didn’t want to ever work in the music industry for a living.
See, the notion of Patsy Cline being amazing isn’t something that’s either controversial or particularly arcane; this isn’t secret knowledge. (And btw, that’s not to denigrate this thread, because Pogue does a great job of calling out a great song, the lyrics you might’ve missed, and the fantastic way Patsy executes it.) But if you ask a thousand music fans who have any breadth of exposure to music and music history, “Would you like to listen to some Patsy Cline?” you’ll get damn near a unanimity of opinion on her excellence.
So it’s 1992, and I’m a paid intern/flunky doing field tour support for a major record label, the entry-est of entry level jobs in the industry. And a band on our label with song getting MTV and radio airplay is touring the country, and as I’m in the midwest, I’m charged with being their tour manager’s gofer and whatnot for four tour stops from Memphis to St. Louis to Kansas City to Denver. And they had a rented bus that I was on, and I’d just fly back to STL after the Denver stop.
So we’re in the tour bus, heading through the middle of nowhere in Kansas, and the group decides they have to stop for lunch. So we find this town of about 10,000 or so off I-70 and a reasonable looking diner place. We’re all in the diner, we’ve all ordered. And there’s a jukebox in the corner. And one of the guys in the band jokingly goes to check it out…and comes back laughing about how “shite” it is. I go over, and it is mostly terrible. But there’s also three Patsy Cline 45s in there, including a cool lesser-known single “When I Get Thru With You”.
And so I dutifully report to the band that the jukebox is indeed awful, excepting some Patsy Cline singles. And the manager of the band says “So…definitely shite then.” And the lead singer of the band follows with “Fuckin’ terrible.”
And at that moment, I realized something I’d been told by a friend who’d gotten out of the music industry already was absolutely true: no one in the industry actually likes or cares about good music, and they’re all tone-deaf assholes. And that if I wanted to work in that industry, I’d have no choice about who or whom I worked to promote and assist in their careers.
So yeah. Thanks to Patsy Cline for getting me off that path. (Said band, btw, has largely disappeared into the Ned’s Atomic Dustbin of history.)
